The assumption that runs through this passage that the mere æsthetic contemplation of past experience gives the equivalent of actual experience is found in writers of far higher standing than Wilde--in Renan, for instance. The æsthete would look on his dream as a substitute for the actual, and at the same time convert the actual into a dream. (_Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt._) It is not easy to take such a programme of universal dreaming seriously. In the long run the dreamer himself does not find it easy to take it seriously. For his attempts to live his chimera result, as we have seen in the case of romantic love, in more or less disastrous defeat and disillusion. The disillusioned romanticist continues to cling to his dream, but intellectually, at least, he often comes at the same time to stand aloof from it. This subject of disillusion may best be considered, along with certain other important aspects of the movement, in connection with the singular phenomenon known as romantic irony. CHAPTER VII ROMANTIC IRONY The first romanticist who worked out a theory of irony was Friedrich Schlegel.[170] The attempt to put this theory into practice, after the fashion of Tieck’s plays, seemed and seemed rightly even to later representatives of the movement to be extravagant. Thus Hegel, who in his ideas on art continues in so many respects the Schlegels, repudiates irony. Formerly, says Heine, who is himself in any larger survey, the chief of German romantic ironists, when a man had said a stupid thing he had said it; now he can explain it away as “irony.” Nevertheless one cannot afford to neglect this early German theory. It derives in an interesting way from the views that the partisans of original genius had put forth regarding the rôle of the creative imagination. The imagination as we have seen is to be free to wander wild in its own empire of chimeras. Rousseau showed the possibilities of an imagination that is at once extraordinarily rich and also perfectly free in this sense. I have said that Kant believed like the original genius that the nobility of art depends on the free “play” of the imagination; though he adds that art should at the same time submit to a purpose that is not a purpose--whatever that may mean. Schiller in his “Æsthetic Letters” relaxed the rationalistic rigor of Kant in favor of feeling and associated even more emphatically the ideality and creativeness of art with its free imaginative play, its emancipation from specific aim. The personal friction that arose between the Schlegels and Schiller has perhaps obscured somewhat their general indebtedness to him. The Schlegelian irony in particular merely pushes to an extreme the doctrine that nothing must interfere with the imagination in its creative play. “The caprice of the poet,” as Friedrich Schlegel says, “suffers no law above itself.” Why indeed should the poet allow any restriction to be placed upon his caprice in